A nine-year-old boy has died after an operation to treat his severe epilepsy was cancelled because Britain's top children's hospital had run out of money.

Peter Buckle, from Evenwood, in County Durham, had a massive seizure and died last Monday. He had been waiting to undergo surgery at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London.

The brain operation which might have saved his life had been cancelled twice. The first time, on March 15, Great Ormond Street cut back its operation lists after finding that it had treated more children than its budget allowed for. The operation was rescheduled for April 22, but cancelled three days beforehand when a ward was closed after staff contracted a viral infection. It had since been rescheduled for June 10.

Peter's mother, Judith, 42, said: "We will never know if the operation would have saved him - that is the most awful thing about this. I was very bitter, just like any mother would be, but it has been a long road. We are devastated. But that's life, isn't it?

"We will remember him for all the wonderful memories he has given to us. He was our special little boy."

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Bruno's comment:

Collectivist Drones like Krugman pine for the type of "Single Payer" system of death seen above. It's vile. Ineffecient as our system is, this kid would be alive if he were here.

Single Payer is unsustainable. Free Markets, with some form of safety net, is sustainable, but better yet, a far more moral system.

Health savings accounts are growing in popularity, with nearly one-third of employers in a recent survey saying they plan to offer HSAs next year.

A survey released Thursday by Mellon Financial Corp.'s Human Resources & Investor Solutions unit revealed that while only 7% of the 360 employer respondents now offer HSAs, 32% expect to add them in 2006.

The survey, "Health Reimbursement Arrangements/Health Savings Accounts: National Trends," was completed in the second quarter of this year. It studied employers with an average of 9,000 workers.

HSAs, authorized by the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, are portable health savings accounts that employees can use to pay for qualified medical expenses. HSAs are linked to high-deductible health insurance plans to cover catastrophic medical costs. Both employers and employees can make tax-free contributions to the accounts.

The survey found that an average of 16% of eligible employees are enrolled in HSAs among organizations responding to the study. Survey respondents said they are aiming at an enrollment goal of 24% of eligible employees.

While small employers and individuals are the main consumers of HSAs, Mellon expects in 2006 "an explosion of HSAs, with many more large employers adding them to their benefits package," said Brad Engel, national health and welfare product leader in HR&IS' Chicago office.

The survey also found that HSA growth will significantly exceed that of health reimbursement arrangements, another vehicle that can be linked to high-deductible plans. Sixteen percent of responding employers said they now offer HRAs, and 20% said they plan to add them next year.

In fact, among employers that have not yet implemented HRAs, just over half said they are likely to skip over them and instead adopt HSAs.

"Plan sponsors are going directly to health savings accounts because employees and other plan members view them positively, seeing them as their own money. It's hard for a book entry account to compete with real movable cash," Mr. Engel said, comparing HRAs to HSAs.

This article talks about a growing number of clinics that offer discounted services to the less well off.

Just imagine what the impact of HSA accounts and individual choice will have as these types of phenomena grow.

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Excerpt:

Doctors who've stopped taking medical insurance say the money they save by not having to process paperwork allows them to keep rates affordable for people who have jobs but are uninsured -- a growing demographic in Michigan. More than 300,000 of the state's 1.1 million uninsured have jobs, based on data from the National Health Interview Survey.

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I long for the day that people realize how evil all this paperwork & bureaucracy truly is. It is time to vocally expose the people who promote it. It is "make work" for the mediocre.

With PPOBlue High-Deductible, Highmark enters a segment of the insurance market that has been surging in popularity. More than 1 million people receive health coverage through lower-premium, high-deductible health insurance plans that are offered with health saving accounts, twice as many as six months ago, a study by America's Health Insurance Plans found. Much of the recent growth is among employers who are offering the plans to employees, according to the Washington D.C.-based trade group.

Among 99 insurers tracking the trend, previously uninsured people bought 37 percent of the individual policies, and 27 percent of the policies in the small-group market have been sold to employers who did not previously offer coverage, AHIP President and CEO Karen Ignagni said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

Below are 1.03 million people who won't need need Medicare. This is how we dismantle the welfare state.

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HSA enrollment leaps in last six months: SurveyLed by a more than 12-fold increase in enrollment by employees working for larger businesses, the number of people with health savings accounts linked to high-deductible insurance plans has more than doubled in half a year, according to a survey.

The survey, based on responses from 99 members of the Washington-based trade association America's Health Insurance Plans, found that as of March 2005, about 1.03 million people were enrolled in HSA-linked high-deductible plans, up from 438,000 in September 2004.

While enrollment leaped in all parts of the market, HSA growth, measured by percentage increase, was greatest among employers with more than 50 employees. As of March, 162,000 people were enrolled in HSA products offered by employers with more than 50 employees, up from just 13,000 in September 2004.

During that same six-month period, HSA enrollment in the small group market—businesses with 50 or fewer employees—nearly doubled to 147,000 from 79,000, while in the individual market, enrollment swelled to 556,000 from 346,000.

While HSAs, authorized by Congress under a 2003 law, have been available since Jan. 1, 2004, many employers waited to offer the plans until after the Treasury Department issued guidance on many of the operational questions that had been raised about HSAs, AHIP officials said.

In the wake of that regulatory guidance, released in August 2004, larger employers now are moving to include HSAs as part of the health insurance plan choices they offer employees, said AHIP President and Chief Executive Officer Karen Ignagni.

Ms. Ignagni expects growth of HSA-linked high-deductible plans, with substantially lower premiums than more traditional health care plans, to continue to be strong. "The number will definitely be higher the next time out," she said.

New data from Assurant Health provides some insight, consistent with what we've seen in the past, on who is taking advantage of Health Savings Accounts:

Remember that HSA-opponents said that only the young, single, and well-off would use HSAs. That has not been the case:

73% of HSA purchasers are families with children;

35% of HSA purchasers are from households of four or more people;

57% of HSA purchasers are over age 40; and

40% of all HSA purchasers have high school or technical school training as their highest level of education.

And the argument that HSAs would just pull the "cream" out of other insurance options hasn't proven true, either. About 40 percent of those who have applied for Assurant's HSAs do not indicate any prior coverage.

Put simply, this consumer-driven option has done exactly what its proponents said it would: lower the cost of care by bringing consumers back into the loop for non-catastrophic care and, in turn, helping many who find traditional insurance too expensive find an alternative that fits them better.

Any system that divorces the user (patient) from the provider (doctor, hospital, etc.) is doomed. This is as true of American "third payer" group insurance schemes, which are only slightly more efficient than the stupidity of "free" government health care.

Again, there is no intellectually sound argument against Health Savings Accountsand other reforms that move the "welfare state" from huge and worthless bureaucracies to individualized control.

We should be more than willing to subsidize such individualization for the poor & indigent, as they won't always be that way.

The best word to describe socialism's collective schemes is "unsustainable," as the article below points out (though they obviously can't stand reporting it).

Patients fed up with long waiting lists in Canada are fuelling a fast-growing demand for brokerages that arrange speedy service in the United States as well as in Quebec's burgeoning for-profit medical industry.

Brokers and other similar companies say business has as much as tripled over the past year as Canadians apparently become more comfortable with paying for diagnostic tests, second opinions and even surgery.

They say their patients include not only the wealthy but also middle-class people willing to take out second mortgages or lines of credit to pay for faster care.

Driving the move are Canada's lengthy waiting lists for many medical procedures. A study last year found Canadians waited an average of 8.4 weeks from their general practitioner's referral to an appointment with a specialist in 12 different medical specialties, then waited another 9.5 weeks for their treatment. Those wait times are almost double what a similar study found in 1993.

An increasing number of patients looking to skirt the public system are being referred to physicians in Quebec's private health care sector, where operations such as hip replacements can be bought out of pocket -- and where the federal government has done little to intervene.

Patients approach the agencies in need of everything from joint replacements to diagnostic work and cancer treatment.

The number that OneWorld Medicare of B.C. sends to the United States for at least a consultation has jumped three-fold over the past 12 months, while the company fielded twice as many inquiries between January and March as it did in all of 2004.

"We have seen a very large growth in the last year," said Mike Starko of OneWorld.

"We shouldn't have to be sending people down to the U.S., we really shouldn't. But that's the unfortunate reality at this point."

"Swansinger and his partners switched to HSAs this year, halving their premiums. The old plan had no deductible, while the new one has a $2,500 deductible for individuals and $5,000 for families. The firm is giving employees with individual coverage $1,050 a year toward their HSA; those with family coverage get $3,250. Employee contributions to the accounts -- up to $2,650 for singles and $5,250 for families -- are tax-deductible. Unused money rolls over at yearend."

This is a good indicator of the types of policies that will eventually reduce the need for Medicare & other Pay-As-You-Go schemes.

You should all have your employers look into these policies. They are good for you AND for your employers.

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Excerpt:

Aetna will begin selling Aetna HealthFund Health Savings Account plans May 1 in 16 states, including Connecticut, and in Washington, D.C., to employers of 50 or fewer workers. The company will also sell the plans to individuals in eight states, including Connecticut, plus Washington, D.C.

The plans integrate pharmacy, dental and other benefits, along with medical coverage.

In terms of Health Care, the thing reasonable people fear most is the advent of a "Single Payer" nationalized system. To combat such a frightening prospect, we have to be able to point to the negatives of such a system...

If you want to understand the Health Care crisis, you need go no further than divorcing the consumer/patient from the provider. In Europe, this was done by socializing medical care, and in the US it was by limiting deductions for health care to businesses.

While our system still had the benefits of some market control, the advent of tax subsidized "first dollar" coverage and the addition of government managed Medicare put us on the same unsustainable track as Europe. With large numbers of citizens buying into the illusion of "free" healthcare (Medicare for seniors & group insurance for employees), it was only a matter of time until the cost explosion caught up with the premiums.

HMOs & PPOs were the last ditch effort to save an un-salvageable system. Until you get rid of third payer and single payer distortions, health care cannot be "fixed." HSAs fix that distortion by re-acquainting the consumer with the costs of their care.